There are definitely tensions. People used to say that capitalism leads to democracy. Today I guess the feeling is that autocratic (and often former communist, in a nicely ironic twist) states make better managers of capitalist economies.

My eyeballs could see some new wavelengths. So for me, the rainbow looked a little broader, it was "Sort of Red, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet, Even More Purpley." But nobody goes around gazing at rainbows all the time, except maybe gay guys.

It's funny that it's "brought to you by Deus Ex" - I'm playing the third game at the moment. Some aspects of the backstory and aesthetics are a bit cyberpunk-by-numbers but it's quite entertaining. Some nice little in-jokes about RoboCop and stuff like that (it's set in Detroit).

Richard Baldwin skillfully takes on this daunting task in a new book, starting all the way back with the hunter-gatherers. For too long, he says, traditional analysis of trade has been too narrow, he argues.

The economist, who is a professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and president of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, has been researching globalization and trade for 30 years. As anti-globalization forces now sweep across the world, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization (Harvard University Press) is well timed.

Baldwin argues that globalization takes shape in three distinct stages: the ability to move goods, then ideas, and finally people. Since the early 19th century, the cost of the first two has fallen dramatically, spurring the surge in international trade that is now a feature of the modern global economy.

The standard line from politicians in recent times is that everyone wins from globalization. But the backlash from low-skilled workers who lost their jobs to cheaper labor abroad has forced a change in tone.

Musk says that the disruption of car-based transportation will take place over the next 20 years, and that within 10 years it will be "unusual" for anything other than driverless cars to be manufactured. Because, as Musk says, "the single largest employer of people is driving in various forms," a lot of people are going to be out of jobs very soon. "Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed."